A lot of great gems do this: they automatically include themselves into ActiveRecord::Base, or even worse, into Object or Class directly. I am looking at you, state_machine. In some cases, it is enough for me to not use it (still looking at you, state_machine).

The plan with that blog post, which is more of a step-by-step thing where I won't explain a lot of things, but do it, is to have a VM with Dokku installed where you can push your app built with one of the supported language (by default: Ruby, Node.js, Java, Play!, Python, PHP, Clojure, Go, Dart) and run it with a PostgreSQL 9.1 server in it's own Docker container. I'll assume Rails for a few Rails specific steps, but you can skip those if you are not a Rails person.

People get in touch with me quite often to ask me how to learn Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails, get better or updated with their craftsmanship. Here are some resources I think are awesome, some paid, some free.

You know what is Monologue, right? It is a basic blogging engine built as a Rails mountable engine and has few dependencies to make it easy to embed in an already existing Rails app. You can also use it in a brand new Rails app! It has few features but it is easy to extend.

As you might know, I worked with three guys on a hackaton last weekend: Rails Rumble. We had 48 hours to build an app. We had a lot of fun! That was my first real hackaton and most probably not the last one. Let's see how we did.

Last week I decided to register to Rails Rumble. I had no idea what would be my project at first. I had a few ideas but still was alone and not sure of what would be my project yet. I've invited a friend and ex-coworker, Alex, earlier this week and we did a planning session, short & sweet. There was no doubt, we would build Wizenews.com

I just released a minor version of Monologue which contains a few small features and few bug fixes. There is a "breaking" change about the URL patterns, but a migration is included. Do not forget to run a "db:migrate".

I recently started to ask myself if I should be doing a simple website for Monologue to separate my personal blog from Monologue related stuff. I would see a blog (surprise!), few guides there, acces to a forum maybe or maybe I should just start an IRC channel and a Google Groups? Eventually there could also be a list of extensions. It might be too early? Any thoughts?

I've launched Monologuetwo weeks ago now. It's been a great ride since then. There was much more noise around it than I could have dreamed of for an initial release. Here's a summary of what happened and what's next.

I recently started to work on a basic blogging engine. It is a Rails (mountable) engine which means it can be mounted within an already existing Rails 3.1+ app or in a new Rails app dedicated to a blog. It also means it has a completely isolated namespace. It has been powering this blog for sometime now and I have the pleasure to announce today that it reached it's first stable release on rubygems. It is called Monologue. It has a really short list of features and that is what I wanted, for now at least. We'll see where that leads Monologue in the future.

Rails engines are awesome, but can also be a pain in the [choose your word]. Mixing Spree and Refinery is a great example of how things can go bad. Both are great products that are easy to extend, but both are using Devise. And then the depency nightmare starts. They both require Devise 2, yay! They still use both Devise, so, what engine will handle logins, logouts, roles, user management, etc? Spree or Refinery? Can you feel the pain? I did feel it...

I first launched that blog with a bought theme that I stripped down. I didn't like the result as much I as I wanted to like it. Still, I decided it was time to launch my blog, so I did. But now, I trashed "old" look "redesigned" it from "scratch" with a simple design, which was the goal at first. I used Skeleton. You should take a look at it.

I have used open source products for a long time. I first used Linux around 1997 or maybe before, can't remember exactly. What I remember is that it was way, WAY, less intuitive to install and use. It was still great. I could also tell you how bad was my first lines of PHP which were probably written in 1997 or 1998. It was horrible. Still talking about my code here. I have always been a huge open source fan, but not a purist who can't see the right solution for a given problem.

A nice addition to Rails that came with version 3.1 was the mountable engines which are basically full Rails apps that you can mount in another Rails app. They have fully isolated namespace, which is great! That will let you add, say, an e-commerce solution like Spree, a forum like Forem or a CMS like Refinery or Locomotive in your own Rails application.